John Pescatore and I published today “Defining The Next Generation Firewall” (NGFW). The note ‘liner notes’ may help provide some context. Gartner has been talking about Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) for a while – in 2004 we had a note titled “Next generation Firewalls Include Intrusion Prevention”.

We have been increasing the weighting for NGFW capabilities in each successive Enterprise Network Firewall Magic Quadrant (MQ), so there will not be a separate MQ for NGFW: this next generation is not a new product or an artificial label, but a progression of firewall and IPS technology.

The note was published now because the market is starting to see early versions of these enterprise class products: some firewall vendors waking up to a big IPS market, changes in network traffic to being squeezed through fewer ports and protocols, an emerging firewall policy management market, and the signaling between other network security products. In the note we also specify what a NGFW is not, in response to inquiries from Gartner clients and as a further guide to where this market is heading.

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Greg Young
Research VP6 years at Gartner22 years IT security

Greg Young is a research vice president in Gartner and the lead analyst for network security. Mr. Young has experience in IT security in product companies, and in both the private and public sectors. He spent his military career in technology security… Read Full Bio

Thoughts on Defining The Next Generation Firewall Research Note: The Liner Notes

Greg,
Id like to know what is so different about PaloAlto’s offering now, versus
a year ago when it wasnt able to qualify to make it into the magic quadrant.

Im very interested to find how they could not qualify one year, but make #1 the next. That is quite a huge jump. Also, from what I have found, please correct me if im wrong, but I only see PA mentioned. There are other NGFW vendors, 1 that i noticed that looks very good from 2007.

Hi Chris:
I suggest looking through the MQ inclusion criteria and the Palo Alto text and that could provide context on why they were not included.

Regarding “#1”, since we haven’t released the next MQ version – I’m not clear on the jump referred to.

The NGFW note looks at the technology required to meet the demands for this next step in FW development – and we didn’t mention any vendors specifically so as not to step on the MQ underway, and we wanted to focus on the technology in this note.

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